Lewisville ISD works toward localized school assessment standards

1/4

Staff photo by DANIEL HOUSTON

Hicks Elementary principal Curtis Martin stands in front of a wall of badge awards with second-graders Evan Enderlin (from left), Landon Karrh, Katie Smith and Emmy Phillips. Hicks is piloting the badge system this school year to help emphasize the district’s strategic priorities, like digital proficiency and good citizenship.

When Hicks Elementary principal Curtis Martin observes the effects of his school’s new badge system, he sees kids excited about their progress.

“The basic goal,” Martin said, “is to treat each other with kindness and compassion.”

The badge system is one of the first attempts by an LISD school to support new, localized learning objectives that came out of the district’s strategic design discussions during the last couple of years.

The district has been gathering community input since late 2011, with the ultimate goal of eventually implementing a new accountability system for assessing school performance that goes beyond state and national standards, said superintendent Stephen Waddell.

“Underneath all this is an underlying assumption: You can’t talk about local control if you don’t engage the community,” Waddell said. “We tend to keep community members involved in all the things we do.”

After gathering public input at summits and focus groups, the district formed a strategic design team made up of 26 members from the district and community. This team produced a list of goals for district schools that stressed creating a nurturing learning environment, advancing technological literacy and designing more varied methods of assessing student achievement.

“Everything we put in those documents had to be a consensus, rather than a majority,” said Elbert Boyd, strategic design team member and LISD parent. “It was challenging, because you have so many different backgrounds. What we had in common was we all cared.”

In the spring of 2012, a campus design team at Hicks began to formulate a plan to implement priorities that aren’t directly addressed in state assessments.

Hicks students are expected to earn six badges, which serve as a motivational tool for the kids and a way to track how the district’s priorities are being addressed in the classroom.

“In order to get some of these more difficult things done and to create more accountability for the teachers, [the team] came up with doing the badges,” Martin said.

To earn the badges, kids have to particpate in an anti-bullying campaign, participate in community service projects, develop an electronic portfolio, learn about conscientious behavior on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and present their work to a panel of adults.

Waddell’s ultimate goal — the new accountability system — is still several years away from fruition, he said.

“It would give more room for teachers to design classes [and] design learning for the students that’s more engaging and deeper,” Waddell said.

LISD is a member of Texas High Performance Schools Consortium, a group of 23 school districts across the state working to develop accountability standards on a more localized level.

Last summer, both houses of the Texas Legislature unanimously passed House Bill No. 2824, which would have exempted consortium member districts from state testing requirements, allowing them instead to develop more localized assessments of academic achievement and college readiness.

The bill was vetoed by Gov. Rick Perry in June.

“Flexibility and innovation are important, but we will not compromise academic rigor or student outcomes,” Perry said in the veto statement. He went on to say the state would work to allow districts more leeway to innovate without exempting them from key state assessments.

“We’re not going to let that stop the work we’re going to do,” Waddell said. “When you have every single legislator in Texas voting for a bill, there’s a lot more to get done at the legislative level.”

In the meantime, district officials are focused on fleshing out some of its local priorities, including developing a new high-school graduate profile that details where the district thinks every student should be by the time they leave the school system.

“I see this as a process where we’re going to go ahead and do things at the local level while still trying to work with the state,” Waddell said.

At Hicks, the results of the badge system’s first year are hard to quantify, Martin said, but he is confident they are making a difference.

“It is hard to measure,” Martin said. “Obviously, at any school, you’re going to have [some] negative interactions between kids, but I do believe they’re minimized because of what we’re teaching.”

To post a comment, log into your chosen social network and then add your comment below. Your comments are subject to our Terms of Service and the privacy policy and terms of service of your social network. If you do not want to comment with a social network, please consider writing a letter to the editor.